Books can take you anywhere across oceans, across borders to places you may have

never seen and those books are some of the ones that we treasure most. I'm Linda Holmes and today we're recommending

great books that take you around the world on Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR.

Joining me today is Leah Danella, she's the supervising editor at NPR's code switch, hey Leah.

Hey Linda. Welcome back to the show.

We're always delighted to have you.

Books we love as many of our listeners hopefully know

is NPR's sortable list of book recommendations

from real people inside and outside NPR and today we've arrived

so to speak at stories about places around the world.

Leah what is the first recommendation that you brought? My first

recommendation is a book called Chilean poet, a novel, and it's by Alejandro

Zombra. All right, tell me a little bit about Chilean poet.

Okay, so the story follows this guy.

He starts out as a teenager, a young guy named Gonzalo,

and it kind of travels with him throughout his life.

It takes place in Santiago and Gonzalo is kind of as many of us are trying to figure out who he is what he wants to do with his life and as a young man he kind of reconnects a romance with his high

school girlfriend and winds up being the stepfather to her young child.

And so as he's kind of floating through his 20s,

figuring out what that's going to mean

and what he wants to do, he's also figuring out

what it means to be, I mean, the way he kind of describes it as sort of a dad but not really in this role that doesn't have a huge amount of good representations in pop culture and media, so he's he's figuring that out.

...